Beware: a massive (fruity) spam attack is hitting Instagram

Updated at 1.59 pm, June 29, 2013: If you are an Instagram user, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen quite a few photos of fruit appearing in your stream recently, along with messages extolling a miracle fruit diet. Spammers are posting the photos to a user’s profile, as well as changing the URL in that person’s bio.

The scale of this seems to be pretty large. The link (which has been generated through bit.ly for some users) takes you to a fake BBC page and is getting a lot of attention. The stats for that bit.ly link are shown in the graphic below, with more than 30,000 clicks so far. It appears to be one of the first large-scale spam attacks to hit Instagram, a service that has grown expontentially over the past year. The service, which just launched video two weeks ago, now gets 130 million active users per month.

I have asked Facebook, Instagram’s new owners, to offer more clarity as to what is going. We’ll update the post when we hear back.Updated at 1.59 pm, June 29, 2013: Here is an update from Facebook

Earlier today a small portion of our users experienced a spam incident where unwanted photos were posted from their accounts. Our security and spam team quickly took actions to secure the accounts involved, and the posted photos are being deleted.

Given by the reaction to our post especially among those who I follow on Twitter and others who follow me, I wouldn’t characterize it as “small portion” of users. The Facebook/Instagram team still hasn’t offered an explanation as to what went wrong. I eagerly await details. Here are some examples of spammy photos that look like normal photos of fruit:

PS: I am choosing not to link to the page mostly because I don’t want to give spammers any more traffic.